What happens when you drive 7 TOSAs and one director an hour and a half one way in a district Suburban to the state summit meeting on Personal Financial Literacy and discover that the state…
- Hasn’t yet figured out how the new standards will be assessed
- Doesn’t know when they will know how the new standards will be assessed
- Hasn’t figured out how much time, energy and money it will take to effectively implement these standards across the state.
Other educators might panic in the face of these pronouncements. Others can sympathize with our plight. It is certainly is difficult to lead a district when there are so many unanswered questions.
But, what we realized is that in the midst – there are plenty of known answers that give us sufficient information to press forward!
Recently, the New York Times published an article, Your Money – Working Financial Literacy in with the Three R’s. “Most Americans aren’t fluent in the language of money,” states the author, Tara Siegal Bernard in the lead of her story. And, sadly – our team which left early morning to attend this important state summit learned that this fact is true and we are empowered by our state to support our young learners understand this 21st century literacy skill.
Colorado is presently one of thirteen states which require personal financial literacy education. In our state, the standards are embedded in the economics strand of the P-12 Social Studies standards and the in various strands of the P-12 Math standards.
Knowing that our Career and Technical Education (CTE) teachers have long been providing quality learning for students in the areas of finance, money management, consumer and business practices, it makes sense to our district to bring together our three content groups: math, social studies and CTE, together to articulate a vision and plan for integrating the Colorado Personal Financial Literacy (PFL) standards into action.
What makes this project more exciting is the overwhelming support for this venture by the three combined groups. During our District Wednesday on April 7 our Business & Marketing, Industrial Technology, and Family and Consumer Studies teachers discussed how they could support the PFL standards integration through their classes, in combination of support through the math and social studies classes.
In May, representatives from these content areas will meet to begin the work of articulating the standards into required and elective classes that will create a strong, authentic 21st century learning opportunity for our students. We’ll keep you posted on our progress.
